I’m thoroughly enjoying my time here in LA from a mobile perspective (Apart from the THOUSANDS of people who seem to like carrying their mobile phones in gunslinger fast-draw belt holsters. That winds me up no end. I’m not sure why. I think perhaps because, back in the UK, to do so carries ultra-geek connotations. I feel like stopping each person on the street and saying ‘NO’ to their face, whilst pointing at their belt holster.)
Being able to walk around and observe how the mobile medium is being used by the population is really exciting. Witness, for example, everybody’s favourite mobile information provider, 4INFO. I’ve written extensively about 4INFO over the years but since it’s American, I’ve never been able to use it since I’m generally based in the UK.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I sat down at breakfast and flipped out my copy of USA Today and noticed the 4INFO brand name on the front page of each major section. That’s a brilliant deal for 4INFO — which gains customers and exposure every day of the week, and a super deal for the USA Today newspaper — who get to offer their readers extended services by mobile.
I snapped some photos…
I snapped this pic of the Lifestyle front page to show where the 4INFO promo is located (It’s bottom right of this shot):
And, they’re even on the weather page:
Fantastic. I can’t think of a better example of a mobile information company getting such PRIME publicity on a national newspaper. I wonder what the traffic is like from it? Phenomenal, I’m sure. I’ll ask them and see if they can comment.
My girlfriend and I sat down to watch The Office (UK version) Series One again last night. After 4 viewings I still cringe at this briliant sitcom…..mostly at Gareth’s gun sling holster for his “portable phone”. So to think an entire nation is walking round with them still is very scary indeed 😉
4Info sounds like a great mobile/keyword info service in the USA. But it is very interesting that they add their name to all services in that way. iTAGG have also been providing keyword service in the UK for over 5 years and have always taken the view that we simply sell the keywords and that it is up to the client to decide how to use and promote them. To ensure that all clients added “iTAGG” to their promotion would in my opinion be very odd; and our understanding of the UK business market is that they wouldn’t accept this. It would be like an ISP insisting that whenever you wrote “find out more about us by visiting http://mywebsite.com” that you’d have to add the name of the ISP after it. But you can’t discount 4Info’s success over there in the land of mobile gunslingers, so whatever works I guess!
steve
I’ve used a number of 4Info’s alerts and while some are decent some are total garbage. Nothing more than a medium to throw some celeb wallpaper add at you, with little thought behind the actual alert you’re trying to get. They recently partnered with Evite.com with a ton of fanfare (probably 4Info’s PR machine rather than actual excitement), and the alert was awful. I got the name and date of the event, but no other info. I din’t even get the complete address because they needed room to insert, “Celeb gossip! Reply CELEB” I’m less than impressed with 4Info. When are they going to inovate something. They are sending SMS alerts, WOW!!, super exciting. I’m sure they have smart people over there, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from what they send out. It’s all the same old thing, no creativity behind any of it. If they don’t get their act together, other companies are going to quickly pass them by…….